As technology advances, consumer electronics tend to play increasingly significant roles in everyday life. As a result, users tend to expect greater functionality, mobility, and convenience from their electronic devices, as exemplified by modern mobile phones, navigation devices, personal digital assistants, portable media players, and other devices often providing a wealth of functionality beyond core applications. However, the greater functionality often tends to be accompanied by significant learning curves and other barriers that prevent users from fully exploiting device capabilities (e.g., features may often be buried within difficult to navigate menus or interfaces). Moreover, although increasing demand for mobility magnifies the need for simple on-the-go device interaction mechanisms, existing systems often have complex human to machine interfaces. For example, existing human to machine interfaces tend to primarily utilize various combinations of keyboards, keypads, point and click techniques, touch screen displays, or other interface mechanisms. However, these interfaces may often be unsuitable for mobile or vehicular devices (e.g., navigation devices), as they tend to be cumbersome in environments where speed of interaction and dangers of distraction pose significant issues. As such, existing systems often fall short in providing simple and intuitive interaction mechanisms, potentially inhibiting mass-market adoption for certain technologies. As such, there is an ever-growing demand for ways to exploit technology in intuitive ways.
In response to these and other problems, various existing systems have turned to voice recognition software to simplify human to machine interactions. For example, voice recognition software can enable a user to exploit applications and features of a device that may otherwise be unfamiliar, unknown, or difficult to use. However, existing voice user interfaces, when they actually work, still require significant learning on the part of the user. For example, existing voice user interfaces (e.g., command and control systems) often require users to memorize syntaxes, words, phrases, or other keywords or qualifiers in order to issue queries or commands. Similarly, when users may be uncertain of exactly what to request, or what a device may be capable of, existing systems cannot engage with the user in a productive, cooperative, natural language dialogue to resolve requests and advance conversations. Instead, many existing speech interfaces force users to use predetermined commands or keywords to communicate requests in ways that systems can understand. By contrast, cognitive research on human interaction demonstrates that a person asking a question or giving a command typically relies heavily on context and shared knowledge of an answering person. Similarly, the answering person also tends to rely on the context and shared knowledge to inform what may be an appropriate response. However, existing voice user interfaces do not adequately utilize context, shared knowledge, or other similar information to provide an environment in which users and devices can cooperate to satisfy mutual goals through conversational, natural language interaction.
Furthermore, demand for global positional systems and other navigation-enabled devices has grown significantly in recent years. Navigation devices often tend to be used while a user may be driving, on-the-go, or in other environments where having a hands-free interface provides critical advantages. For example, a user may want to avoid being distracted by looking away from the road, yet the user may also want to interact with a navigation device, for example, to calculate a route to a destination, recalculate the route in response to traffic, find a local restaurant, gas station, or other point of interest, or perform another navigation related task. In these and other instances, efficiently processing a natural language voice-based input could enable the user to interact with the navigation device in a safer, simpler, and more effective way. However, existing systems often fall short in providing an integrated, conversational, natural language voice user interface that can provide such advantages in navigation and other mobile environments.
Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.